Chevrolet: 1911-1960

By Michael W. R. Davis

The Chevrolet car and truck business traces its roots back to Michigan s lumber industry in the middle of the 19th century. Lumber mills gave way to carriage and wagon manufacturing and the claim, before motorcars burst on the scene, that Flint was the vehicle capital of the world. This is the story of how those wagon makers quickly converted to producing automobiles, overtaking automotive pioneer and archrival Ford in sales, and building the Chevrolet brand into the global powerhouse entity it is today. This volume traces the first half (1911 1960) of Chevrolet s 100-year history in photographic detail and provides an unparalleled spotter guide for long-forgotten (or never-known) Chevrolet cars and trucks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Aug 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781439641897

Michael W. R. Davis

Author Michael W.R. Davis is a veteran automotive journalist and historian, as well as an author of six previous Arcadia photographic histories. Though he is a Chevrolet historian, Davis spent 25 years with Ford Motor Company before returning to journalism, authoring and serving as the executive director of the Detroit Historical Society for five years. In addition to holding degrees from Yale and Eastern Michigan Universities, Davis is a member of the Society of Automotive Historians and a trustee of the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library, a main source of many of the images in this book.

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INTRODUCTION

Chevrolet’s 100-year history nominally began November 3, 1911, when William C. Durant incorporated the Chevrolet Motor Company. Only three years earlier, Durant had founded General Motors. Having failed to enlist Henry Ford in General Motors—Durant’s bankers wouldn’t advance the upfront cash Ford wanted—Durant decided to launch Chevrolet as a low-priced car to compete with Ford.

As this new photographic history of Chevrolet’s first 50 years (1911–1960) demonstrates, the company’s roots actually go back another 60 years to Durant’s grandfather Henry Crapo, who made a pile of money in New England’s whaling industry. Crapo then invested his bankroll in 14,000 acres of timber in Lapeer County, east of Flint, Michigan, in the 1850s. Crapo’s idea was to cut the timber and float the logs down the Flint River to a large sawmill in Saginaw, with easy access to Lake Huron freighters. When he found out logs could not be floated to Saginaw because of rapids in the river, he built his own sawmill above the rapids in Flint, counting on an existing railroad to deliver his lumber to lake shipping.

Soon there were many sawmills along the river in Flint. But in just a few more years, nearby forests had been largely cleared and sawmill operators turned their woodworking expertise to manufacturing horse-drawn vehicles. Among the 30 or so buggy-makers in Flint by the 19th century’s end was the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, an 1886 partnership of Billy Durant and Dallas Dort that produced a remarkable 50,000 units in 1900. Durant conceived that achieving high volume sales success in buggy manufacturing required three coordinated tasks: (1) control of parts suppliers, (2) a strong network of sales and service dealers, and (3) clever promotion—business concepts that later led to the success of Chevrolet. However, it was rival Flint carriage manufacturer James Whiting who foresaw the need to invest in the new motorcars, bringing Buick from Detroit to Flint in 1904 and later inviting Durant to manage Buick.

By 1911, when Durant started Chevrolet, there were some 270 motorized vehicle brands on the US car market. Today, only four of those 270 American makes survive: Chevrolet, its sister General Motors brands Buick and Cadillac, and Chevrolet’s longtime archrival, Ford.

In its first full year, 1912, Chevrolet managed to produce, at most, 2,999 units of its new car, the overpriced $2,150 Classic Six. That same year, Ford turned out 170,068 Model T cars in its American plants plus another 11,584 in Canada. Today, Chevrolet can state that more Chevrolets have been sold worldwide than any other brand. This is the story of that remarkable success.

When Ford shut down its factories in 1927 to convert from the legendary T to the Model A, Chevrolet outsold the pioneer mass-production leader for the first time, a prize it has maintained in the United States for most of the succeeding years of its 100-year history. Chevrolet accomplished this by following Durant’s original concepts plus ingenious marketing, expanded production capacity, and notable engineering improvements under the guidance of GM greats Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and William S. Knudsen, the latter a former Ford production expert.

Chevrolet’s first 50 years were arguably its most successful. Chevy overcame Ford’s production and sales leadership in the 1920s, expanding that dominance in the 1930s, then made important but little-heralded contributions to the Arsenal of Democracy in the 1940s, and pioneered long-lasting product developments in the 1950s. In this final decade of its first 50 years, Chevy introduced new creature comforts such as automatic transmissions and power steering for the low-priced market followed by the Corvette sports car and the small-block V8 that ultimately propelled Chevrolet from its traditional value image to street-and-track high performance for the muscle car era of its second 50 years.

By the end of Chevrolet’s first half-century, the manufacture of automobiles had grown enormously complicated with many layers of suppliers contributing to the final assembly. These suppliers began with raw materials (such as iron ore and paint ingredients), and progressed upward in the supply chain to parts making (such as tires and door handles), then to sub-assemblies (such as seating and transmissions). Any time a design was changed, whether mechanical or cosmetic, it could have repercussions throughout the supply chain. Thus by 1960, it could be said that the auto industry—in which Chevrolet was the largest producer—accounted for one out of every seven jobs in America.

I have never owned a Chevrolet or any other General Motors product. To top it off, I spent 25 years in public relations with Ford Motor Company, where General Motors was the enemy, the overwhelming competitor. The reader and Chevy enthusiast might well ask: what is a Ford guy doing with a book about Chevrolet history?

There are three interconnected reasons. First, Detroit is really a small town, a one-industry town—an automobile town. We metropolitan Detroiters may be work rivals, but we go to church with one another, our children go to school together, we serve on civic committees together, we play golf together—we are neighbors and friends. Like members of the different branches of the armed forces, there is fierce rivalry among us, but we also have learned to pull together as an industry. When one of us is hurt the other also feels some pain, and we share some delight in one another’s successes. Not everyone around Detroit might agree, but that is my take after more than 50 years here.

Second, after retiring from Ford, I advanced from being a mere journalist and publicist with a couple of history degrees to an author-journalist specializing in automotive history with the advantage of inside knowledge about how automotive sausage is made.

Third, after producing several corporate automotive photographic histories published by Arcadia, it was